Coinciding with last year’s 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, a number of new books appeared concerned with establishing the exact pattern of events which gave rise to the construction of Europe’s most notorious location for mass murder, as well as closely examining the camp’s complex apparatus of victim deception and extermination. These are not the first works to appear charged with the grisly labour of piecing together the evolution of Hitler’s most productive slaughter house, but all three books profit from the recent release of previously classified information from Soviet archives. Therefore they can be said to have had an unprecedented view into the most detailed workings of the camp. The result is an inevitable filling in of holes and a rounding off of edges. The new books include a detailed analysis of the development of Auschwitz – from its lowly beginnings as a Polish Cavalry Barracks to industrialised killing factory to its final end as the half-demolished typhus infected wasteland encountered by Russian troops in January 1945. Never before has such public interest in the Holocaust been galvanized by the approach of an anniversary. Never before has an armchair public been so well informed as to the precise processes leading to genocide and the historical implications for Germany’s industrial and transport infrastructure in colluding with the SS. It is now not uncommon to see a work on Auschwitz sitting alongside bestseller fiction titles in UK bookshops. Such a sight would have been unthinkable even a decade ago.

Before examining the three most recent offerings I should like to recall that important forebear which contributed crucially to an understanding of the camp and its origins. It is important to recognise that all works on such a subject grow from each other and are in large part an extension of previous research. This is certainly the case with the landmark work of Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum from 1994 as regards the two latest Auschwitz studies, and earlier exhaustive examinations of the Holocaust such as that by Martin Gilbert in relation to the study by Guido Knopp. Anatomy of the AuschwitzDeath Camp, a scrupulously researched, unreservedly scholarly brick of a book had the misfortune of appearing just in advance of the current wave of public interest in the subject. This book was certainly not stacked high on tables in Borders and Waterstones, but those who recognised its pioneering importance sought it out as the most detailed and thorough investigation into the machinery of mass murder in the Auschwitz complex. The now familiar map displaying the numbing geometric vastness of Birkenau was first presented here, showing barracks and killing installations in precise detail. This was a time when holocaust deniers were particularly vociferous. Along with the charged content of Daniel Goldhagen’s controversial book Hitler’sWilling Executioners (1996), these maps and plans of the construction of crematoria and gas chambers served to silence all but the hardcore revisionists. Anatomy of the AuschwitzDeath Camp revealed how the bestial processes of extinction were ‘sanctioned’ by the anodyne climate of an industrial framework, employing its own clinical jargon, which enabled vast numbers of ‘units’ to be ‘processed’. One wonders how much of the Gutman/Berenbaum book fed into those recently published. It would seem likely that it provided a valuable source of material to cross check, or at the least supplied ideas towards producing a new study which absorbed the Russian data. What is certain is that this book has not been superseded by the new books but complemented. Anatomy of the AuschwitzDeath Camp remains an essential tool for understanding the architecture of the camp with a wealth of detailed maps and diagrams not fully reproduced in the latest books.

Sybile Steinbacher’s pocket-sized book published by Penguin ought to be issued free by governments to every citizen of Europe. This little book’s objective is to give the most concise and up to date information regarding the evolution of Auschwitz from a concentration camp for undesirables to the chief centre for genocide in the Reich. The style is notably terse and pared down to the raw facts. And what facts these are, as Steinbacher carefully selects the most damning and overwhelming statistics from the Soviet archives. Even to those familiar with the grim tallies of the dead and awesome scale of human destruction, these figures are utterly bewildering, impossible to absorb. Steinbacher takes us on a gruelling tour of the notorious main camps but also the lesser known satellite camps which drew their labour from Auschwitz I. In the early stages of the camp’s development, the Nazis viewed the Auschwitz complex as an ideal focal point from which to launch a programme of Germanisation in the newly conquered Eastern territories. A pattern of rural settlements supporting a thriving agricultural economy was the SS dream – or perhaps more accurately a teutonic fantasy of immigrant Aryan peasants hay making for the Fuhrer – relished by Himmler and Hoess over coffee and cigars in the Kommandant’s villa. However, as more and more human traffic flowed in from newly acquired territories both east and west, it became a place to process ever growing numbers of the condemned. Once the decision had been made to develop the concentration camp of Auschwitz as a centre for mass killing, the system was in a continual state of flux and reassessment of possibilities. In their thoroughness and dread efficiency, the SS constantly tweaked the machinery of this human disposal process to maximise extermination. Those unable to work were selected for immediate execution and the remainder driven out to labour in the rubber factory of IG Farben at Monowitz, the third camp in the complex. There they would die slowly in indescribable conditions or fall victim to selections from the workforce for gassing. Following the chillingly unadorned chapter heading of ‘The equipment and technique of mass murder’ one learns again of the ‘normalisation’ of the process of extermination and the setting of ever higher ‘productivity targets’ by zealous SS ‘directors’. The individual horror stories have long been in the public domain. Purses and lampshades made of human skin, women’s hair used to fill mattresses on U-boats, skulls as ornaments on the desks of SS guards. But the extent of this obsessive recycling and exploitation of every human material for commercial, military and scientific purposes is overwhelming. The stories are not sensational or lurid, but matter of fact, which make them all the more disturbing. For example when the Russians entered Danzig towards the end of the war, they discovered an institute where German scientists were making soap from corpses. Those caught red-handed in the basement were never prosecuted, and denied they had committed a crime, having merely been sent ‘materials’ to work on. No remorse was expressed. This revolting and terrifying synthesis of scientific expediency and the German mania for self-sufficiency is effectively exposed through Steinbacher’s cool prose. She spares us nothing, naming companies and firms openly profiting from mass murder. Steinbacher spotlights the lust for cataloguing, counting, amassing, shipping and allocating exhibited by functionaries striving to attain targets and meet quotas set by their masters, all to the profit of the German Reich. Gold yanked from the teeth of the dead melted down and shipped to the Reichsbank in ingots. Human hair spun into thread, then turned into felt and rope. Among the clients who paid fifty pfennigs a kilo was the Bremer Wollkämmerei (Bremen wool carding company) and the Alex Zink felt factory near Nuremburg. The SS sold human bone meal to a fertilizer company in Stremieszyce. Human ash was not only used as a fertilizer but for the insulation of camp buildings, and even scattered on roads and paths to prevent accidents to SS men in icy conditions. When the Russians entered Auschwitz they found over seven tons of women’s hair ready for shipment to Germany. They estimated that it had been shorn from 140,000 victims. When the crematoria malfunctioned, which often occurred due to excessive heat, technical teams were called out from German firms like Topf und Söhne to repair their product. In the summer of 1944, Steinbacher reminds us, due to the vast numbers being processed the bodies of Hungarian Jews were burned outside on huge pyres. Naturally the SS sought advice from German technicians on how best to incinerate large numbers of corpses in the open air.

Steinbacher also recounts the final stages of the camp’s existence with sober precision; the chaos and senseless butchery of the death marches, the frantic attempts of the perpetrators to disguise their crimes and root out anyone who might reveal them. She leaves us with a raft of unimaginable statistics, which, due to including everyday personal objects recognisable to anyone, leave the reader stunned. For example, the Russians counted 837,000 women’s coats in storage at Birkenau and 14,000 carpets. That the victims had lugged an entire carpet with them, unaware of their fate, or a winter coat for the worsening weather ahead, cannot fail to move even the most jaded of onlookers. Steinbacher also unearths some of the most cynical and staggering idiosyncrasies of the Holocaust, such as the fact that victims were obliged to pay for the rail journey to their own deaths. The cost was four pfennigs for every Km of track and for children under ten, half price. The SS escort also went for half price, on a group ticket. Surely the most incredible twist of all; passengers were informed the return journey would be free.

Laurence Rees’ book Auschwitz and the Final Solution follows a similar path to the Steinbacher, but has more room to manoeuvre and so unsurprisingly pushes a little further into the various stages of the camp’s development. The Rees book has become an international bestseller, due in part to the well researched and executed drama documentary which accompanied the book’s launch in January 2005. Rees successfully weaves fresh witness testimony (notably that of Oscar Groening, an SS officer who worked in a clerical capacity at Auschwitz) with poignant excerpts from previous publications such as Dr Nyliszki’s notorious account of working as a physician in the camp. Around these vital sources he reconstructs the various stages of the camp’s expansion. Taking advantage of the most pertinent material already in the public domain and the Soviet documents, he creates an eminently readable, devastating account which leaves no area in shadow. Rees does not merely recount the habitual catalogue of sordid events, but seeks answers and follows leads, questioning why certain decisions were made. He sees disturbing connections, black ironies and shameless corruption leaking out all over the place, not only on the German side. Despite the relentless negativity, Rees still finds space for stories of inmates’ breathtaking heroism and sacrifice. The interview with Groening is a pivotal moment in the book as it shows once again how the ordinary sane individual, saturated with propaganda, can too easily perceive a logic in the extermination of those considered the ‘enemy within’. When Groening witnessed acts of brutality at the ramp in the aftermath of a transport, he complained to his superiors and suggested that if the Jews were to be destroyed then perhaps it could be done in a more humane way. In principle he still agreed with the extermination policy and yet he was reacting with empathy as a normal human being would to acts of bestial violence. There were surely many more Groenings in the SS and other German ranks feeling the same way, struggling with their consciences on the difficult question of genocide. But the chilling and inescapable fact is that ultimately they almost all accepted it as an onerous task necessary to safeguard the Fatherland. Himmler’s infamous rallying speech urging his men to not to flinch from the task in hand and reassuring them that in spite of all, they would retain their ‘decency’ was surely the abhorrent consequence of their vacillation.

Perhaps the most heart-rending episode in the book and one which rightly proves to be an unrelenting thorn in the conscience of France, is the account of the fate of the 4000 French school children separated from their parents by the French authorities, kept alone in the most squalid conditions and then packed off to Auschwitz where all were subsequently gassed. From 16th July 1942 French Gendarmes began rounding up Jews in Paris and elsewhere. The inconceivably cynical deal the Vichy Government made to arrest foreign Jews and not their own citizens was only the beginning of the shame. As Rees makes clear the complicity of the French quislings with their German masters was consistent at every stage of the process. Despite strong protest from church leaders the gendarmes went about their work with noticeable zeal. It was clear the Vichy government wanted their house cleared of foreign Jews and were only too happy to oblige the Germans. The idea that the low figure of 80,000 Jews deported from France (only 20-25% of the total Jewish population) was the result of a noble rearguard action against overwhelming German demands for Jews is, as Rees shows, a fiction. The French authorities could have point-blank refused to assist in the round ups or at least dragged their feet, but instead they almost threw the Jews into the arms of the Germans.

Another important area Rees focuses on is the uniquely schizophrenic nature of Auschwitz as both concentration camp and extermination centre which made it a special place in the Nazi system from the outset and partially explains why it survived almost intact at the end of the war. Earlier camps such as Treblinka and Belzec, Rees explains, were constructed purely for killing and erased by the Nazis after their labours were completed, the land ploughed over to mask the crimes forever. But interestingly only the crematoria and gas chambers were partially destroyed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, though one must concede that perhaps this was also because the SS had little time in which to carry out a wider act of destruction, rather then merely a decision of policy. Rees also explains the curious bond Himmler forged with Hoess, which came about when the two ex farmers met in 1940 to discuss plans for the development of Auschwitz as focus for the general policy of Agrarian Germanisation planned for the area of Silesia. As was his wont, Himmler never saw the arduous practicalities and immense human exploitation and destruction involved but merely the shining glories ascribed to his name from such epic schemes. Rees illuminates the trails of unimaginable human misery which resulted from the monstrous fantasies of Nazi leaders like Himmler; how with a stroke of a pen or the wave of a hand across a map whole populations were destined to slavery or extermination.

However many times one sees the photographs of doomed victims, their impact does not pale. Rees carefully selects and positions some of the most crucial images to complement his study. The photo montage commences with the peacock Hoess in full SS regalia, smiling with a genial Himmler on his visit to the camp in 1942 and culminates with the very different photo of Hoess in captivity, a runtish, inconsequential figure, his prison trousers held up by string. Between lie colour images of the Lodz ghetto with their soon to be annihilated inhabitants, followed by linked scenes from the stages of the selection process at Birkenau and shots of the newly completed gas chambers and crematoria. A particularly moving photograph, rarely published, shows a group of Hungarian Jews waiting in the birch grove for the gas chamber to become vacant. They seem as if on a rural picnic, families settled on the grass sharing their last food, attending to the children. They appear quite unaware of their fate, but one woman on the extreme left has turned her head to look at something beyond the frame. An air of anxiety is etched on her young face. She could be any European citizen, then or now. These bewildered people in their bright headscarves, dragged at random from their land, deposited in a holding pen to a human abattoir would be ash only hours after this picture was taken. Contrast this with the photograph of Himmler surveying plans at the camp in the hot summer of 1942. The SS chief has removed his cap to dab a heavily perspiring brow with a handkerchief, an involuntary and banal movement which somehow speaks to us of the feeble ordinariness of this notorious man, who suffers like us all from the heat on a hot day. Always the photograph harbours a little more than it seems, revealing subtleties of truth inadvertently discarded by their long dead participants.

Hitler’s Holocaust by Guido Knopp is an ideal companion volume to the more Auschwitz centred books. Like those discussed he has taken full advantage of the Soviet archives and although Knopp deals with the camps themselves, he is concerned with events which lead to the necessity of the Final Solution. The Knopp book joins a crowded thoroughfare of general Holocaust studies. Without the new material one has to say that Knopp’s book would be in many ways merely turning over the soil of previous works, recycling well-thumbed testimonies from other sources, but there is enough compelling new evidence to reward even those who have read everything else. However, whether this study can be said to be, as the jacket triumphantly claims, ‘the most complete history of the Holocaust to date’, is open to question. To my mind Knopp is most penetrating in the early chapters on the lead up to genocide, the radicalisation of German policy towards the Jews following unforeseen setbacks in Russia. Unlike most of his predecessors, Knopp had access to newly released East German state security documents on deportation of Jews to the east, as well as the private papers of Einsatzgruppen participants. This enables him to cast more light on the procedure of deportation and the earlier mass shootings in the newly conquered territories, whose grisly tallies were gloated over by a Fuhrer at pains to avoid any paper trail linking him to the butchery. Knopp seeks to alert the reader to the direct relation between the increasingly destructive cravings of Hitler and the slaughter perpetrated by his minions on the ground. Knopp, echoing some of the early material in the Rees book, charts how the course of events in the Soviet Union had a direct bearing on the fate of Europe’s Jews. From vague fantastical notions of dumping the Jews in African colonies or forcing them all beyond the Urals came, within a comparatively short space of time, complex plans for their total annihilation.

The fatal combination of an inflexible ideology and catastrophic military decisions on the part of Hitler led the German army into a cul-de-sac at Stalingrad and with this catastrophe came the realisation that plans for the Germanisation of Soviet territory and the securing of crucial oilfields in the Caucasus were doomed. As if he had already planned for this decisive moment, Hitler lashed out with renewed fury against the ‘Jewish Bolshevik menace’, which he claimed had led the world into war. The lingering death of a whole German army at Stalingrad, a situation his inept military decisions had created then further inflamed, he blamed solely on the Jews. What’s more, he claimed, wealthy American Jews were pushing Roosevelt into the arms of Stalin. Faced with the imminent entry of the USA into the war, a scenario which Hitler had not bargained for, Germany’s ultimate defeat seemed certain. Everyone knew a war on two fronts was unwinnable, even a deluded Hitler. When he heard, after Roosevelt joined Stalin and Churchill, that the three allies had agreed to destroy Nazi Germany unconditionally his course was set. For this escalation in unforeseen events and as a balm to his colossal failure in command, Hitler set out to exterminate the Jews once and for all. At least if nothing else he would achieve that. So began a flurry of orders from Fuhrer HQ to that effect in late 1941, culminating in the infamous Wannsee conference presided over by SS chief Heydrich in January 1942. As Knopp rightly summarises, ‘this confused mixture of groundless and deluded notions coupled with the premonition that the war could not now be won, formed the fertile ground from which Hitler’s decision grew. Following the Wansee conference Hitler’s ‘reckoning’ began, with Jews from across Europe funnelled into already swollen ghettoes acting as holding pens, vestibules of death, and the urgent construction of the first extermination camps at Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec.

Knopp’s study then moves on to the camps themselves. Echoing the thrust of Steinbacher and Rees to expose the insidious bureaucracy of organised murder and the culpability of those colluding with the SS, Knopp examines the obsessive tinkering with the mechanism by interested parties within the transport infrastructure to ensure the constant delivery of Jews for ‘resettlement in the east’. Chief offender was the Reichsbahn which assisted the SS in redirecting traffic on their network to ensure Jewish cattle truck convoys were able to reach their destinations. This was a complex business due to fierce competition for track from military and passenger trains. Knopp explains how, through trial and error, the SS gradually perfected their system of slaughter in order that their gas chambers and crematoria reached optimum levels of capacity. A continual regulated supply of ‘units’ via the rail network was crucial. The earlier embarrassing failures at Treblinka and other camps, where sheer numbers could overwhelm the machinery causing unsavoury log jams, would no longer be tolerated. At Birkenau the SS soon worked out how best to process the new arrivals, devising all manner of ingenious schemes to deceive their victims. Although ‘disinfection’ was always the logical reason for undressing and proceeding to the ‘bathhouse’, things could on occasion go awry and the SS needed to have contingency plans for more brutal measures if the softly-softly approach failed. However, everything was done to minimise this costly eventuality. On the ramp at Birkenau the women were separated from the men but not from their children. The SS soon realised that women with young children would not be easily parted from their child and might cause hysterical scenes that compromised efficiency. Therefore scores of young healthy women with children were sent straight to the gas chambers. This was admittedly a serious waste of women fit for labour, but more importantly ensured panic did not break out. The SS also soon noticed that if their charges were kept in a state of raging thirst after days without water, then they would think of nothing else but satisfying this craving and therefore co-operate more willingly in their own destruction. It was not uncommon to see those detained in the little Birch wood, awaiting their turn to undress, licking the dew from the grass in sheer desperation.

If a transport suspected their fate or had been warned on arrival, then wily and experienced SS personnel would mingle with the crowd, reassuring them in the politest tones; ‘Don’t worry, Germany is a civilised country,’ or ‘refreshments will be served in the cafeteria after the bath, a crèche will be available for young mothers..’ etc. This breathtaking stream of lies usually silenced the doubters and anyone spotted spreading sinister rumours was politely escorted from the group and despatched out of earshot with a small calibre weapon. But perhaps in the end, it was simply easier for the condemned to believe in life than a wretched death only hours away. The SS cynically exploited the inconceivability of the notion of extermination. They were so successful in this that normally only two or three SS men needed to be present during a gassing in Birkenau. Much of the cajoling and instruction were given by the Sonderkommando. Placed in an impossible situation these tragic slaves risked being thrown alive into the ovens if caught alerting those carefully tying their laces and neatly arranging their clothes for collection on return from the showers.

The production line at Auschwitz peaked over the summer of 1944 with the daily arrival of thousands of Hungarian Jews. Operating at full capacity with five gas chambers and crematoria, mass shootings and pyres screened by copses of birch trees, the daily tally of the dead could easily run to 10,000. And as demand dictated on a self-sufficient assembly line, these 10,000 whose corpses had barely turned cold had their possessions expertly sorted by their fellow Jews, in the vast storage house known as ‘Canada’, for despatch to the Reich.

What these three essential and unashamedly gruelling books have in common is an ability to demonstrate the relative ease with which opportunist criminals and ideological fanatics, having infected their subordinates with a mindset which saw the logic of applying a pest control policy to an entire race, roped in the functionary and the worker, the pen pusher and the bricklayer, the engine driver and the technician, legitimizing the evil they were to perpetrate through the trappings of an industrial method of production. The unsettling feeling is that somehow, despite the increase in our knowledge of what occurred, we as a society will never absorb the full implications of this inconceivable aberration in our recent history. It is perhaps only ever possible to approach the holocaust obliquely. The lingering sense of a wider human extinction that follows in its wake and the fragility of the individual mind when confronted by the reality of the events lend the holocaust an atmosphere of uniqueness, a sacrosanct tragedy misappropriated by both Jewish nationalists and their revisionist counterparts. The culpability of an industrialised society is rarely thrown into question – how that society both exploited and served a policy of genocide, then carried on afterwards, wiping the slate clean as if nothing had happened – in the same way as the industries which had provided the means of mass slaughter in WWI smoothly changed gear into peacetime without compromising their profit margins. But the disturbing conclusion of these books is in showing how easily the individuals of such a society continued to follow their ascribed path, fulfil their duty, fill their quota, execute their order, design their product, just as they did in peace time, screened from inestimable human debasement by indifference, ignorance or the delusion that their honest toil was insulated from evil by its very ordinariness. Business as usual. Why should the makers of cremation ovens not relish an order from the SS, when the relationship between client and firm is cordial and professional? An order is an order. How the bodies arrived in the oven is of no concern. In similar fashion the ‘doctors’ in Auschwitz justified their violation of corpses. They would wait in the wings at executions to seize fresh body parts, which they saw simply as ‘materials’ in the same way as the scientists in Danzig who made soap from corpses.

What these three books do, other than meticulously reconstructing the anatomy of the camps and their evil genesis, is to tease the most recalcitrant facts out of the shadow and expose their full implications. The more we know of the mundane detail, the more grimly logical (though no less traumatic) events become, given the ideological circumstances. Surely such studies prove that it’s simply not enough to rhetorically bleat ‘it must never happen again’ at memorials, or in museums and classrooms, as if we can define the ‘it’ as something measurable, something that is complete and contained by our language and thought. One must conclude then that the full historical and sociological repercussions of this human engineered cataclysm may never be properly assimilated by its descendents.